Jade and I finally made it up to the Blodgett crash site a couple of weekends ago. I took a trip up there the day after Thanksgiving but it was snowing hard and the snowpack was quite deep, so I had difficulty finding the wreckage up on the ridge in limited visibility. This time around the weather was clear and somewhat warm for a mid December day. We got to the top of the ridge near a rock outcrop and took shelter from the wind on the East side of the rocks. I was digging through my pack for some snacks and noticed she had already taken off to go find the crash site. Withing a couple of minutes I could hear her screaming that she had found it.

Directions: Take the Woodmen Road exit west from Interstate 25 to a light where Woodmen and Rockrimmon roads meet; keep right. Drive five miles as the road winds toward the foothills and turn right into the clearly marked Blodgett Peak Open Space parking lot.

The hike: From Blodgett Peak Open Space parking lot, follow the wide, road-like trail that winds toward the peak. From the trail, hikers can look up and see their route climb through oaks on the southeastern flank, then enter a steep drainage on the south face before gaining a saddle just west of the summit. Take the road into the hills for just over a mile until it ends in a group of firs. Keep left at 0.8 mile at a junction with a road that goes to a nearby water tank. When the road ends a few steps later follow a clear trail less than a mile north, passing a spur to a neighborhood on the right, and arriving at a T intersection with another trail. Go left. The junction is unmarked, so note it for the way down. The trail climbs in a transect across the southwest flank of the peak. When the trail reaches the wooded southern drainage, it switches back east, climbs a bit, then switches back west and squeezes through a slot between two huge granite boulders. From here the trail gets nasty, shooting up the hill for 500 feet. The trail slacks off as it nears a ridge. At a saddle, follow the trail right a few hundred yards to Blodgett’s rocky cap. From the top, follow a trailless ridge down to the north/northwest. The wreck is .5 miles and 800 feet down on the east side of the ridge. A good map is critical to find it. The coordinates are 38 degrees 57 minutes 48.63 seconds north latitude and 104 degrees 54 minutes 35.53 seconds west longitude.

The state has almost 700 documented military crashes and uncounted civilian wrecks. The vast majority of the military planes, such as the B-24 near Trinidad, went down on training flights during World War II. Between 1942 and 1945, the United States was forced to grow from a nation of farmers and factory workers into the largest air force in the world. The transformation came at a steep price. An estimated 15,000 servicemen died in 22,000 training flights before ever seeing battle. In Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, where, Wallace said, most of the training took place, crash numbers were especially high. “These were young kids flying these planes,” Wallace said as he jostled through the bushes to search another hillside. “Training was short. You had new pilots. New aircraft. You had problems.” Colorado had training airfields in Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo. In two years, about 300 bombers, fighters and training planes crashed along the Front Range. The Colorado Springs area is home to more than any other. The city is ringed by wreck sites: a B-24 Liberator on Cheyenne Mountain, another above the Flying W Ranch, a trio of B-29 Superfortresses — the model that dropped the atomic bomb — on the plains east of town. “At the crashes out on the plains, there usually isn’t much to see,” said Wallace. The twisted metal was carted away for scrap. But mountain wrecks are protected by steep, isolated terrain, so they often go unvisited. Some have changed little in decades. Not many of them are recognizable as planes. Before the days of radar and computer navigation, crews had to find their way through clouds by dead reckoning. If calculations were slightly wrong, or a wind blew them off course, they could (and often did) slam into the mountains. “There’s an old saying among pilots,” said Duke Sumonia, a fellow wreck chaser. “The clouds have rocks in them.” What remains after a pilot finds those rocks is little more than mattress-size shreds of aluminum and engine parts strewn over a hillside. That’s what Wallace was looking for above Trinidad: a glint of metal in the woods. A 55,000-pound bomber shouldn’t be hard to find. But time had hidden much. Wreck chasing first caught Wallace’s eye in 1990 when he was hiking above the Flying W Ranch west of Colorado Springs. He had never been a pilot, or particularly interested in planes, but then he spotted a hunk of engine. “I thought to myself, ‘How did a car get way up here?’” he said. Then he found more pieces, even fake training bombs. It seemed to be a plane. At the library, he discovered it was, in fact, a massive, four-engine B-24 bomber that hit the hill in a snowstorm in 1944. “After that I was hooked,” he said. He began tracking down sites through government archives and reels of microfilm newspapers. He got so good at aviation history that he was hired to work at the museum at Peterson Air Force Base. Eventually, he hooked up with a handful of guys who called themselves wreck chasers. They hunted for crash sites all over Colorado, Wyoming and the Southwest. These days the chasers go by a slightly more respectable, and longer, name: the Aviation Archaeology wing of the Colorado Aviation Historical Society. “It suggests that we’re more about documenting and less about just collecting cool artifacts,” said Wallace. Collecting robs later chasers of the fun of discovery. It’s sometimes a crime, since any wreckage older than 50 years is protected on public land by the Antiquities Act. So chasers, for the most part, just investigate. Think of it as CSI: World War II. They start with official crash records, then see whether they jibe with eyewitness accounts and crash debris. “Often they don’t. It’s always a mystery,” said Wallace. Wrecks chalked up to pilot error or navigation error sometimes turn out to be mechanical. To close the case, some chasers get in touch with survivors. For the dedication of a plaque at a downed B-17 Flying Fortress near Estes Park, the chasers tracked down survivors and convinced one to return, 55 years later, for the ceremony. “At one crash, there were no survivors,” said Sumonia, “but we invited the widow of the navigator and the brothers and sisters to come see it. For 50 years they had felt this guilt because they thought it was the navigator’s fault that all the men died. We were able to tell them it wasn’t. The crash happened at night in a snowstorm; there was nothing a guy could have done.” Any wreck chaser who has spent time in the field can appreciate the challenges of navigation. Wallace visited the mountains above Trinidad three times before he found the B-24 bomber. He had been back twice since then, and now, he was having trouble finding it. “I don’t know if it’s up there or over there,” he said, gazing into the featureless forest. He led on, stepping over an alarmingly fresh and large pile of bear scat, and scrambling up a hill. He usually carries a GPS receiver, but he’d forgotten it. “Wait, what’s that?” he yelled to a group spread out in the trees. “I see metal ahead.” To the untrained eye there was nothing, but then, a few steps on, there it was: torn aluminum skin from the flank of the plane. Then a few steps farther: a huge Boeing engine with its bent propeller still attached. Beyond it, more pieces glinted in the woods. Time and growing trees had tried to hide them, but the wreck chasers had made careful notes, so that even after the last witnesses have died, the history will live on. The chasers are working on a national database for all crashes. The work is far from done. In Colorado, dozens of undocumented sites wait on forbidding mountain slopes. Beyond the United States, in jungle covered World War II hot spots such as New Guinea, wrecks number in the hundreds. Right now, an expedition is heading to the South Pacific to search for what may be the most famous wreck of all, Amelia Earhart’s lost resting place. Most wreck chasers love the thrill of tracking a decades-old mystery and the peace of tramping around in the wild. But the big draw, many say, is connecting the living to past loved ones. “It’s the people. It really is,” said Wallace. “The great satisfaction is working with families. We’ve given them answers, sent dog tags back home. That means a lot.”

1) Eat breakfast. We did not eat anything until about 2/3 up and that was the reason I had some difficulty early with some steep stuff. Once I had some sugar in me I felt much stronger.

2) Do not eat a massive Mexican food dinner the night before. Eat something lighter with complex carbs, like spaghetti or sandwiches.

3) Have lunch planned and packed and prepped for the trip.

4a) Do not bring shitty gloves. Good gloves are worth the investment. If my hands are cold/frozen you really cannot do much in the way of using your phone/camera/GPS, unwrapping things, etc. When there is snow and ice on the ground and you are scrambling or walking with Trekking poles you really need good gloves. I bought a pair from Golite on the way home that will allow me to use my phone while wearing them. I will take them out with me next trip.

4b) Bring a secondary thicker pair of gloves. Again when you cannot use your hands things get difficult quick.

5) Bring some sort of super lightweight hankerchief or something like it, to wipe freezing snot off your nose and beard.

6) Make sure to have something to cover your head. A balaclava also might be good to have around.

7) Make sure I actually hit the begin tracking button on the SPOT, instead of the send ok message button.

8) Bring crampons, or miniature crampons always. You never know when things will get icy or snowy.

9) Bring Afghanistan undershirt. There really isn’t anything better

10) For Torrey’s and Greys, there really isn’t any need to bring water up to 12,000 feet or so, since there is a wonderful stream running. Collect water there, and do not need to collect a lot since we can hit the stream up on the way down.

11) Hydrate the night before.

12) Trekking poles are great for descents and for icy conditions, however they are a pain to deal with when doing anything >= class 2+. Invest in some collapsible, lightweight trekking poles. They are versatile.

13a) Be sure to have my phone fully charged before the hike. I only had about 30% power when we started, and we did not even see sunlight until we were 2/3 of the way up so my solar panel was not able to really charge it adequately until we were coming down …

15) The Big Agnes Air Core sleeping pad and my 3-season sleeping bag in the back of the car resulted in some of the best sleep I have ever had out in the country. The Legacy is a bit longer and will probably allow me to stretch my feet out, so take that one when I can.

16) Wet wipes are great to have. I had never used them before even though they were in my first aid kit for years (see item 2).

17) Using the restroom above tree-line sucks (unless you like audiences), but it is certainly worth the effort to head off trail when it’s safe to find a little happy place, instead of pushing through in pain and agony until you simply have to go.

18) Get to the campsite well before dusk if possible. Because my partner was sick, and because we got there late, we both ended up sleeping in the car, instead of pitching a tent or two. I slept great, but he was quite miserable in the passenger seat.

19) Always leave early. Even if there is next to 0% chance of precip you still avoid the crowds, and have more time for breaks (see item 17).

20) For day-trips <10 miles, there really isn’t much of a need to bring the Mule, since I can rarely find anything in it anyways. Instead bring a single compartment ultra-light with a bladder and everything else wrapped in a plastic bag. The other way to go would be to bring a Nalgene bottle instead. For Grey’s Torreys, this would be preferred. This could save 1.5 – 2 pounds between using the ultralight and bottle instead of the Mule and Bladder.

21) Think long and hard about wearing my summer hiking pants. 3 season pants are probably the safest route during the summer.

22) Bring a tiny rolled up blanket or travel Pillow. They are light weight and worth their weight in Gold when space is not an issue or when you are not hucking your sleeping stuff.

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